Kevin Maher has a hectic, gossipy — find out what Joaquin Phoenix has really been up to — encounter with the actress

And yet Donnenfeld, you suspect, is a role that Mendes could do in her sleep. Watch her opposite Joaquin Phoenix, for instance, in the earlier New York crime drama We Own the Night, and you see it again, playing the gorgeous “straight” woman (a nightclub hostess) to Phoenix’s increasingly unstable and drug-addled avenger. She has since become close friends with Phoenix, giggles at the mere mention of his name, and will happily reveal that his famous two-year absence from the movie business in an alleged bid to become a rap star has been part of a long and elaborate movie project. “I don’t want to rat my friend out,” she says, “but, yes, he has made a movie about it.” I ask her how he kept it all so secret for so long? “Nooooo! I can’t get into that!” she says, suddenly fearful that she’s overstepped the mark. “And I hope I don’t get into trouble with him for say this much, but I believe now that I can say it’s all for a film.”